Looker Studio is free and connects to everything Google. PlotSet is what you use when the chart needs to look designed and move.
Choose Looker Studio for free, live-connected dashboards across Google Analytics, Ads, BigQuery and Sheets — it is very hard to beat on price and connectivity. Choose PlotSet when the chart is a publication or a video rather than a dashboard, and design quality and animation matter.
Looker Studio, formerly Google Data Studio, is Google's free reporting tool. It connects natively to Google Analytics, Ads, BigQuery, Sheets and hundreds of partner sources, refreshes live, and shares through the familiar Drive permission model. Reports embed for free. Its visual vocabulary is dashboard-oriented: scorecards, tables, time series, bar and pie charts.
PlotSet produces designed charts: 300+ templates, animated races and moving maps, MP4 video export on every plan, and plugins for Figma, Google Sheets and Chrome.
Looker Studio's job is to keep a marketing or product dashboard current against live sources, and it does that for free. It has no animation engine and no video export, and its chart styling is functional rather than editorial. PlotSet has no live connectors worth the name, but produces charts that hold up in an article, a deck or a video.
Capabilities verified against public documentation on 2026-08-16.
| Capability | PlotSet | Looker Studio |
|---|---|---|
| Video export (MP4) | YesMP4; watermarked & limited on Free | No |
| Animated & race charts | YesFree on every plan | No |
| Ready-made template library | Yes300+ templates | PartialReport templates, not chart designs |
| AI text-to-chart | No | PartialGemini assistance in Pro contexts |
| Chart from a screenshot | No | No |
| Live interactive embeds | YesFree on every plan | YesFree embedding of reports |
| CSV / Excel import | Yes | PartialFile upload connector; Sheets is the natural path |
| Maps & geo charts | Yes | YesGoogle Maps-backed geo charts |
| Live database / warehouse connections | PartialFiles & Google Sheets; no warehouse connections | YesVery strong across Google and third-party sources |
| Team collaboration | No | YesGoogle Drive sharing model |
| White-label / no branding | Paid planPlus and Enterprise | No |
| API access | Yes | Partial |
| AI agent control (MCP) | Yes13-tool MCP server with OAuth | No |
| Figma plugin | Yes | No |
| Google Sheets add-on | Yes | YesNative Google Sheets connector |
| Free tier | Yes5 static charts/day, 2 videos/day | YesGenuinely free, including embeds |
Prices shown as published by each vendor, checked on 2026-08-16.
Connect Analytics, Ads, BigQuery, Sheets or a partner connector.
Drop charts and scorecards onto report pages.
Set dimensions, metrics, filters and date ranges.
Share via Drive permissions or embed the report for free.
CSV, Excel, or a Google Sheet.
Static, interactive and animated options.
Theme, colours and animation timing, previewed live.
Live embed on any plan, MP4 video on every plan.
Looker Studio is free, and for live dashboards on Google data that is close to unanswerable — PlotSet does not compete there and should not pretend to. The two tools separate on output: Looker Studio cannot animate data, cannot render video, and does not produce charts designed for an external audience. Teams commonly use Looker Studio to monitor and PlotSet to publish.
Data races and animated maps, rendered to MP4 on any plan.
300+ templates built for publication rather than dashboards.
Anyone can view an embedded chart; Looker Studio sharing follows Drive permissions.
Figma plugin and Chrome extension alongside the Sheets add-on.
A 13-tool MCP server with OAuth for AI agents.
Both tools read Google Sheets, so the same sheet can feed a Looker Studio dashboard and a PlotSet chart. Keep Looker Studio for live monitoring; use PlotSet for the version that gets published.
Yes. Looker Studio is free to use, share and embed. Looker Studio Pro adds enterprise support and governance for a fee. For live Google-data dashboards on no budget it is an excellent choice.
Start free with 300+ templates. No credit card required.
